LOSOPHOMO and then some

12 JUL 2011

Dan Sodergren | Guerrilla Marketing Expert

I’ve been away with Doug Richard at the #s4swales event helping start up businesses get better and better with digital marketing and over the last few days it hit me, you really can learn an awful lot about everything over three days but also you can’t teach everything in three hours!

Feedback from the event has been amazing, people have been tweeting praise, and the Welsh government has been happy – even ecstatic – and itis great to be involved in something which gives so much knowledge about marketing and business in such a small amount of time.

There was so much more I wanted to teach people, not just from an egotistical point of view, but because the internet and digital marketing has gone through a revolution over the past year. All which has changed the way we do great marketing and more importantly and rarely, all of it in favour of the small business. You see its now all about LOSOPHOMO.

Lo – location, so – social, pho – photography (and any use of the camera) and mo – mobile.

Let’s start with why this is an advertising revolution and why it is important.

You see your customers are hit with 1000′s of advertising messages a day, so they have become savvy consumers, wise in the world of marketing. Most of them (74%) don’t even believe the advertising they see. They are internet linked in, socially connected, potential brand assassins.

They have a dropping level of attention, they know more and more, they want things that are relevant not to just their demographic but to them personally. They want instant gratification. They can take or leave your products and brands – this is the reality of the consumer society – the consumer has the power. Into this customer focused – me orientated society we bring marketing. We bring digital marketing. We bring great marketing. We have to change with the times, we need to produce promotions that will persuade, and we must add value in our advertising. To do so – we must have more than pretty colours and clever words – we must think differently and use LOSOPHOMO.

LO – Location:

Without geo locational advertising, our consumer knows we don’t know enough about them. Why would I get an advert for something I can’t buy or for something I can’t buy now? Why give someone in London an advert for something they can only get in Manchester. Location is both in time and space. Why offer me something I can’t buy for a month? The nearer the offer in both time and space the more likely the sale. Hence, the potential of being able to advertise within certain locations digitally is such a powerful idea. Then you mix this with the potential of mobile GPS advertising and the world changes.

This is the mixed up world of both social and local. The world of checkin’s and geo location. A leading company researching this new frontier in America is called Lightspeed, who in the last year reported in America that 37% of respondents on Lightspeed’s Mobile Consumer Panel had checked in using a location-based application during the past six months. With the percentage jumping to 54% for 18-24-year-old males- the (52%) had checked in with Facebook Places, while 18% were using FourSquare and 12% were using Google Latitude. The most interesting stats was that 85% of location based app users said they would be likely to visit a store or restaurant if they received a coupon or free item for checking in nearby. This idea had appeal across all age groups. So in June 2011 a large pizza brand launched its first geo locational advertising through a social platform and mobile phones. Domino Pizza revealed its new Stuffed Crust pizza offering consumers free garlic bread via Facebook Deals on mobile when they check-in to any Domino’s store. To claim their free garlic bread, Facebook users need to present the check-in screen on their mobile device at the point-of-sale. Why would Domino Pizza back this strategy? As when you check in, you tell your friends – which is potentially free advertising to an average of 137 people. With Facebook users being twice as active if they use their mobile phones you can see why location mixing with mobile with a topping of social makes a lot of dough for this brand (pun added).

So – Social:

Everyone knows that the internet has gone social, the internet has gone past the linking of people with information (1.0) to people with people (2.0) to maybe a new frontier (3.0) linking people with people to places and times. But just with social itself, Facebook has 700 million users, Linkedin 100 million, there are countless other elements of the social world or as Brian Solis calls it “The Conversation Prism”. In this world of social many new elements have appeared: platforms like Twitter with over a billion tweets a day and the ability to locate the person tweeting. However, unlike the traditional web and traditional marketing, the social aspect and platforms are not controlled by the brands – they are produced by the people for the people with brands advertising through sponsorship or through content creation. They are channels of communication that can go two ways. They build on interaction rather than promotion. They are as Seth Godin puts it “the double edged sword”. They are as I put it – the moment of revolution. As marketing wise, we can now get our potential customers psychographic as well as demographic, thanks to the wealth of cultural specific information Facebook gives us. Our marketing can be focused like a laser beam on our chosen potential clients. And more importantly they can tell their friends – in just one click – taking advertising and making it potentially viral (something which has never happened before)

We can now even convert this traffic straight into potential wealth with F-commerce platforms and websites entirely housed within the walled gardens of Facebook (and I presume soon other social platforms.) Social is huge paradigm shift in marketing and one that we will not move back from.

Whether the full power can be harnessed by small brands is something that I would question due to the very nature of marketing and social proof i.e. who would be a fan of something they knew nothing about. It is this inherent problematical that means social should be only used as part of a bigger marketing strategy. Remember Awareness must come before Action.

However, we all use these social platforms to change our lives. It is reported that 360 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook in a single year, 60 billion videos are watched on YouTube each month, and 36 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each year. And photos is the next big thing.

Pho – Photography and Scanning: The use of the camera and web cam in any appliance.

This seemingly innocuous device – the small camera – the crystal eye in web cams – the more advanced mega pixel devices in mobiles is a HUGE potential for marketing. And one many people do not realise. You see the web is a visual place – and more and more it is a video place. According to Cisco 90% of web traffic will be video by 2013. Your home TV will become just another monitor. You will have pay and display programming and advertising integrated into our normal viewing experiences.

But this is for a much bigger talk on the future of the advertising revolution and Augmented Reality. For now, just now, people taking pictures of places and things is just the start of this phenomenon. If your product or service is visual (and all are) then start looking into Youtube and Flickr as places to dominate your keywords before your competitors do.

Photos of credit cards (i.e. with scanning to prove it) and or bar codes will become the norm for mobile payments and for checking for extra information. You can do this on either your computer with a web cam or as of recently on your mobile phone. QR codes (the black and white boxes which you can scan a url from) are just a stepping stone technology to Augmented Reality but they are a cheap and direct part of the evolutionary process and perfect for small brands. However, it is where you can combine photography and mobile where we see the biggest potential for marketing for small businesses in the next 3 years.

Mo – Mobile:

Mobile is the next big thing. Scratch that mobile was the next big thing, smart phones are now past the tipping point with more than 37% of people owning one in the UK, and we have a growth year on year better than anywhere in the world with around 70% growth. By the middle of 2011 – 85% of handset will be able to go online. By 2012 mobile internet users will outnumber desktop users. Tablet growth will be exponential and help the mobile marketing cause. Mobile payments will become commonplace with the increase use of NFC, and Google predict that £3.3Bn worth of goods will be sold through M-commerce in 2013. This is a BIG growth area for marketing.

Mobile marketing can produce two or three opportunities for small businesses. One pure mobile i.e. is your site mobile optimised? Does your demographic own a smartphone and if so can you advertise your offering to them? Can you service or product be sold through a mobile phone? Some big brands have noticed a 600% increase in m-commerce over the last year. Ebay sells something via mobile every second.

Two, a hybrid of mobile and location, where you can use coupons delivered to people’s mobiles when they get within a certain range of your location (in time and space). In this arena, even SMS text is performing well. Research from mBlox reports that 59% of respondents want retailers and brands to contact them using SMS, showing a huge potential for Blue Tooth push technologies. Mobile coupons are another area of massive potential with as many as 71% of consumers in the UK wanting mobile coupons sent to their phones while they are out shopping. Believe you me, Groupon will be moving into mobile very soon and ever other coupon / group buying force will do so.

The third area is a mix up of old technology, social and cultural references and a huge opportunity for all marketing. It is the area of Augmented Reality. Put simply, now with your mobile phone businesses who wish to market their products through mobile phones can tell:

-Who you are; not only by device demographics but through social demographics via facebook and other mobile and social networks.

-Where you are; through geo locational use of smart phones (GPS) or you checking in.

-What you want, through keyword analysis through search or through collective intelligence monitoring through twitter and Google.

-And when you want it – mainly by timing advertising and by analysis of when you are active.

If you can imagine on top of this you can augment different marketing ideas and graphic adverts on your live view of your smartphone or through an app. Then you now have a feeling about where marketing is going.

It is all LOSOPHOMO and then some – which is a new way of understanding the next level of the advertising revolution.